I'm surprised no one has talked about these cases here - completely fanless designs...
And pretty spiffy looking....

http://www.quietpc.com/products/pc-cases/nof-cs-80

company site
http://www.nofancomputer.com/eng/


their fanless CPU heatsink is interesting...

A review of one of the cases - apparently the man behind Zalman is the also behind Nofan

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/desktops ... -silent-pc

That's a big fanless heatsink - but not much surface area

You didn't search hard enough:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=63983
viewtopic.php?f=20&t=61891
viewtopic.php?f=28&t=63919

Search engine must be broken because I type in "nofan cases" and got zip

I can easily believe that this gigantic CPU heatsink works well, but how about everything else in the case? How are motherboard components and hard drives kept cool with no moving air?

The CPU heats up the board so cooling the CPU could be said to cool some parts of the board especially. But this heatsink isn't going to keep the CPU all that cool.
Worse, the heatsink will radiate heat towards the board.
I'm afraid many motherboards would not do well without any active cooling and this contraption is evidently not the best passive solution.

That whole setup is a case for a literal system meltdown.

Only if you went nuts with CPU overclocking and used a hot video card. Surely it's absolutely fine, as long as:

• The CPU is kept at stock speed, preferably undervolted, and stick with 95W or lower Sandy/Ivy Bridge.
• The RAM is 1.5v or lower (see the thermal images near the bottom of this page).
• For storage, use SSDs, 2.5" hard drives, or 5400RPM 3.5" drives.
• Keep the video card under a ~75W TDP. Perhaps as a rule of thumb, any video card that doesn't require auxiliary power? Eg. HD7750.
• A high quality PSU that can easily handle passive operation, like the Seasonic X-400. SPCR tested it for 24 hours in their hot box.

Can the motherboard's VRMs/mosfets etc. really fail if the CPU is kept at stock speed and doesn't draw too much power?

Adding a 120mm fan at 500rpm to the back of the case isn't hard. This would stop any of the cooling concerns and would not hit noise levels given the low level buzz from other components.

Frostytech has benchmark results for this cooler, but for some reason has not done a written review:
http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.c ... 662&page=5

Do a search on nofan, and you will see the results on the bottom of the page. This is for the smaller version of the heatsink. It looks like it works better horizontally than vertically.

It works pretty good with an 85 watt load, and surprisingly well with a 150 watt load. With a 500 rpm case fan that ducts cool external air to it, it seems like it would handle an overclocked Intel CPU... certainly for day to day use (as opposed to 100% utilization benchmarking... but maybe even that too)

Some manufacturers imply they can when they say you shouldn't dispense with the heatsink fan (I'm talking about standard desktop boards obviously). But maybe that only means passive cooling is unsupported as opposed to dangerous. It likely depends on the motherboard since design and components vary and some are rated to run hotter than others.

Mike says some of his motherboards failed early when he was experimenting with fanless cooling. But maybe motherboards have become less sensitive...

Bottom line: ask your motherboard vendor. They've run overheating tests. Anything else is speculation.

The ambient temperature will make a huge difference here as these small components just depend upon the difference in case ambient and their own temperature to dissipate heat. Computer equipment is typically designed to run in ambient temperatures of up to 40C and a major manufacturer would be mad to release a product that wouldn't work in 99.9th percentile worst conditions: 40C ambient, stock cooling badly installed, in a badly designed case, full of dust, not ideal electrical supply etc. If however you don't have all of those conditions together you can probably push things quite a bit closer to being fanless.

Yet Intel for instance doesn't tell you not to dispense with fans when it comes to their 2010+ Atom boards. They only tell you not using any fans would be dangerous in some situations. Going by the documentation, they feel differently about their 1155 desktop boards...
I couldn't say if the difference is real (different design and components, CPU which puts more strain on the VRM or something) or if it's just a matter or product positioning.

I find it kind odd that they put a fanless CPU cooler into a fairly cheap thin-steel case (it's a re-badged In-Win) that has no provision for drive suspension or improved GPU cooling :/ (Oh, that is if you can fit a GPU in there, looks like it blocks the first two slots on the motherboard). I'd rather someone came up with a proper GPU cooler and left me with a slow fan/pair of fans on the CPU. Maybe that's just me .

Didn't Zalman once do a case that was a heatsink with heatpipes coming off the CPU to the entire case body?
I can partly get that (I think it was pretty expensive though)

This isn't a bad idea but it's not going to be overly practical for most builds. A half decent heatsink with a slow spinning fan really isn't going to be a concern even to folks who are quiet pc orientated.

There are a number of cases like that, mostly miniITX intended for HTPC duty.

Nofan never claimed they build a silent gaming rig. If you didn't know: Only support up to 100w tdp.

The two cases nofan offers have both a lot of holes to ensure enough airflow w/o any case fan. You could always choose to use another case, but don't come complaining if your solution doesn't work.